Tucker Carlson casually maligns David Frum, who responds by deconstructing his former friend's 'cowardly' act
Fox News star Tucker Carlson is having a moment — or, rather, another moment in a Zelig-like career full of them. Lately, he has been torching a select group of conservatives, and David Frum was added to that list Tuesday.
Carlson's ostensible target Tuesday night was the Central Intelligence Agency's curious new ad featuring an "intersectional" Latina millennial officer. Carlson eventually suggested the woman was actually a deep-cover operative trying to recruit agents to infiltrate the real threat to America — which, he assured his viewers, is definitely not white supremacists. No, "if you wanted to save America," he said, "these are the people you'd be worried about":
The decadent rich people from their class at Harvard. It's the gender studies program at Cornell. It's the cat cafes in Austin and Ashville. It's the Monday editorial meetings at The Atlantic magazine, where David Frum is treated as an important intellectual rather than some dopey middle-aged Canadian Twitter celebrity whose life goal is to force America into yet another unwinnable pointless war. [Tucker Carlson, Fox News]
How can Carlson — a self-described trust-fund kid who attended boarding school in Rhode Island and college in Connecticut before being rejected by the CIA — say all that with a straight face? Frum, the Twitter celebrity, tweeted an explanation.
I've known Carlson for more than 20 years. We were colleagues at the Weekly Standard in the 1990s, I appeared fairly often on his MSNBC show in the 2000s. We were "Washington friends" - we had lunch, he came to parties at my house, etc. 2/x
— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 5, 2021
Carlson criticizes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq now, Frum writes, but "he was a FEROCIOUS advocate of both wars" at the time, "when it mattered." He went on to describe Carlson's "cowardly," amoral opportunism.
Maybe that's the fascination of the Carlson TV persona. We all sense that if a Murdoch ordered him, he would say the opposite of everything he says now. Last year, he flipped from "COVID is real" to "COVID is fake." He could flip from anti-vax to pro-vax literally tomorrow. 8/x
— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 5, 2021
I've written much about the Bush years and will write more. I'm undertaking now a book about the whole period 1989-2021. I've felt I owed that. It's not a show or an act. Maybe that's why I so get on Carlson's nerves. END.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 5, 2021
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